Persian Cuisine and Food: From the Royal Kitchens of Cyrus to the Saffron Rice of Isfahan
The first thing a cook in Tehran will tell you about Persian cooking is the tahdig. The crisp crust of rice at the bottom of the pot, browned in butter and saffron, lifted out with a wooden spatula and laid on a plate — that is the test. A bad tahdig is a soggy mess. A good tahdig is a sheet of golden-browned rice, the colour of dark honey, that snaps when you tap it with a spoon. The cook who can deliver a good tahdig can deliver anything the Persian kitchen asks for. The cook who cannot is not yet a cook.
I want to begin with the tahdig because it is the technical and aesthetic heart of the Persian rice tradition, and the Persian rice tradition is the heart of the Persian meal. The technique of preparing Persian rice — the katteh (the slow cooking of the rice in salted water until half done), the dam (the steaming of the rice in a covered pot with butter and saffron), and the tahdig (the crisp crust) — is among the more demanding in any cuisine, and the dishes it produces — chelo kabab, chelo morgh, polo-ye sabzi, polo-ye baadenjaan, polo-ye tahchin, shirin polo — are the most elaborate and celebrated rice dishes in the Middle East.
The standard modern reference in English is Najmieh Batmanglij’s Food of Life (1984, many later editions), the working encyclopedia of the Iranian kitchen; for the medieval Islamic kitchen, Lilia Zaouali’s Medieval Banquet (2007) is the best short treatment; and the older but still useful A. J. Arberry’s translations of the Bustan and Golestan of Saadi give a picture of the medieval Persian table in literary form. The working ethnographers of the modern Iranian kitchen, the people who have actually cooked their way through the regional cuisines, are Batmanglij and her successors. The wider context is in the Persian Culture and Society pillar.
What the climate dictated
The Iranian plateau is a region of high mountains, arid plateaus, and limited but intensive agriculture. Rainfall is scarce, the sun is fierce, and the cultivation of fruits, flowers, and shade-giving trees required careful management of water. The qanat, the underground irrigation channel, the ab anbar, the underground cistern, and the badgir, the wind-catcher tower, made possible the cultivation of the classical Persian garden even in the most arid regions, and the same technology made possible the agriculture that fed the Persian kitchen. The bread, the nan, the flat bread baked in a clay oven, was the staff of life, and the rice of the Gilan and Mazandaran provinces, the Caspian lowlands of northern Iran, was the basis of the great Persian rice dishes.
The introduction of rice to the Iranian plateau, probably in the Sasanian or early Islamic period, transformed Iranian cuisine. The Achaemenid and Parthian period sources refer to rice rarely; Strabo (XV.3.10) mentions it as a crop of the Susa region, but the developed rice tradition of Iran is a Sasanian or post-Sasanian development. The Sasanian period, from 224 to 651 CE, was the great age of Persian cuisine, and the Sasanian royal kitchen at Ctesiphon was famous in the late antique world for the variety and the quality of its dishes. The Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources describe the cuisine of the Sasanian court in some detail, and the surviving Middle Persian texts on food, drink, and court ceremonial — fragments rather than a continuous cookbook tradition — are an important source for the culinary history of the period.
The herbs of the plateau
The herbs of the Iranian plateau — parsley, coriander, dill, mint, fenugreek, tarragon, savory, basil, watercress, and the Persian golpar (Heracleum persicum) — are used in distinctive combinations that distinguish Persian cooking from the cuisines of its neighbours. The Persian tradition of kuku, the herb and egg dish, and the kuku sabzi, the herb kuku, has no real equivalent in the cuisines of the eastern Mediterranean. The use of fresh herbs, often in large quantities, is one of the great marks of Persian cuisine, and the kitchen garden, the baghcheh, of every Iranian household, large or small, was traditionally filled with herbs.
I think the herb tradition is the most under-appreciated element of the Persian kitchen. The combination of parsley, coriander, fenugreek, and chives that goes into the ghormeh sabzi (the green herb stew) is, in its way, as distinctive as the combination of thyme, bay, and parsley in a French bouquet garni, and the Persian herb tradition is a thousand years older. The ash-e reshteh, the noodle and herb ash that is the most famous ceremonial dish of the Persian New Year, is a herb dish of an order that has no real equivalent in Western cooking: noodles, beans, herbs, kashk (the dried whey), and fried onions, served hot, with a flourish of mint oil.
Saffron, rose water, and the sweet tradition
Saffron, the dried stigmas of the Crocus sativus, is the spice that most distinguishes Persian cuisine. Iran produces more than 90% of the world’s saffron, and the saffron harvest of Khorasan, the eastern province, is a major agricultural event of the Iranian year. The use of saffron in Persian cooking is ancient, and the saffron-yellow rice of the chelo is the most visible mark of the cuisine. The combination of saffron, rose water, cardamom, and cinnamon — the so-called “four spices” of the Persian sweet tradition — has no clean equivalent in the spice palettes of the neighbouring cuisines.
The sweets of the Persian tradition — the gaz, the qottab, the sohan, the koloocheh, the bastani, the saffron ice cream — are among the most distinctive of the Islamic world. Baklava is usually treated as a product of the broader Ottoman/Turkish and Greek tradition; the Persian form is the baghlava of the Caspian, which has its own history. The gaz of Isfahan, the saffron and pistachio of Kerman, the pashmak of Yazd, and the samanu of the Persian New Year are all examples of the Persian sweet tradition. The Persian tradition of sheker (sugar) dates from the Sasanian period, when cane sugar — the crop is of South Asian origin, refined in Persia from the Sasanian period onward — was imported and refined into a range of confections.
The kebab and the pishgaman
The Persian kebab is the best-known Persian dish outside Iran, and the great kebab traditions of Iran — the kabab koobideh, the kabab barg, the kabab chenjeh, the kabab jigar, the kabab shashlik — are among the most distinctive in the Middle East. The koobideh, the ground meat kebab, is the most famous, and the technique of grilling the meat over charcoal, of using sumac and saffron, and of serving the kebab with the chelo, the rice, and the kabab torshi, the pickled vegetable condiment, is a defining feature of the Iranian meal.
The khordeh, the snack, and the pishgaman, the appetiser, are the Persian equivalents of the mezze of the Eastern Mediterranean. The mirza ghasemi, the smoked eggplant and garlic dish of Gilan; the kuku sabzi, the herb and egg dish; the masto khiar, the yogurt and cucumber salad; the borani, the yogurt and herb salad; the zeytoon parvardeh, the marinated olive dish of Gilan; the kashk-e bademjan, the eggplant and kashk dish — these are the appetisers of the Persian meal, and the tradition of pishgaman, of small dishes served before the main course, has its own logic that the Turkish and Levantine mezze do not duplicate.
The ash and the khoresh
Two categories of Persian cookery deserve separate mention. The ash, the thick soup, is the first. The Ash-e reshteh, the noodle and herb ash, is the most famous, a thick soup of noodles, beans, herbs, kashk (the dried whey), and fried onions that is traditionally eaten in the Persian New Year celebrations. The ash, in its many forms, is both a daily food and a ceremonial dish, and the making of the ash is often a community event in which the women of a neighbourhood gather to cook and to share.
The khoresh, the stew, is the second. The ghormeh sabzi (the green herb stew with lamb and red kidney beans), the fesenjan (the walnut and pomegranate stew of the Caspian), the gheymeh (the yellow split pea stew with lamb and tomato), and the baghali ghatogh (the fava bean and dill stew of Gilan) are the most famous khoresh of the Persian repertoire. The khoresh is the central dish of the Persian home meal, served with the chelo rice, and the technique of slow-cooking the khoresh over several hours is one of the most demanding in the kitchen. The fesenjan, in particular, requires careful reduction of the walnut and pomegranate base to a balance of nutty and sour that is the signature of the dish.
The diaspora table
The Persian cuisine of the diaspora, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, has adapted the traditional recipes to the ingredients and the tastes of the new countries. The chelo kabab of Tehran, the fesenjan of the Caspian, the qormeh sabzi of Isfahan, the baghali ghatogh of Gilan, the mirza ghasemi of Rasht, the shirin polo of Shiraz, the kashk-e bademjan of Isfahan — these are the dishes that, in the early twenty-first century, are served in the Iranian restaurants of Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Paris, Hamburg, and Sydney. The Persian cuisine of the diaspora has become a marker of Iranian identity abroad, and the adaptation of the traditional recipes to local ingredients — the use of California herbs, Ontario lamb, and Australian rice — has been a small but interesting development in the global history of Persian cooking.
The Persian cuisine of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, the Afghan and the Tajik traditions, are related to the Iranian but have developed their own distinctive dishes. The kabuli pulao, the national dish of Afghanistan, is a Central Asian rice dish with carrots, raisins, and lamb, and the mantu (the steamed dumplings), the qorma (the stew), the sholeh qorma (the meat and chickpea stew), and the ashak (the leek dumpling) are the major dishes of the Afghan tradition. The Tajik cuisine, in turn, has its own distinctive rice dishes — the plov, the qurutob, and the sambusa — that are related to the broader Persian and Central Asian culinary traditions.
A note on the wine tradition
The wine tradition of pre-Islamic Persia, the may and the bade, was widely celebrated in the ancient world, and the wine poems of Hafez and the wine imagery of the Shahnameh are among the great themes of Persian literature. After the Arab conquest, the wine tradition was continued covertly in Zoroastrian and Christian communities and openly in the Sufi tradition, in which wine became a major symbol of divine love. The kharabat, the wine-house, is a central image in the ghazal of Hafez and of the Sufi tradition.
I mention this because the wine tradition, in modern Iran, is largely underground, and the most reliable modern ethnography of the Persian kitchen is silent on it. The post-1979 legal prohibition of alcohol in Iran has driven the wine tradition into private homes, where the production of homemade wine, often from grapes and raisins, continues in defiance of the law, and the may of the pre-Islamic tradition has not, in practice, disappeared. The literary tradition of wine, of course, continues in the ghazal, and Hafez’s verses are still the most quoted lines of Persian poetry at a Persian table.
A site, a herb, a rice crust
A site, an herb, and a rice crust. The site is the Sasanian royal kitchen at Ctesiphon, the institutional foundation of the Persian court cuisine. The herb is the parsley-and-coriander combination that goes into the ghormeh sabzi, the central green stew of the Persian meal. The rice crust is the tahdig, the technical and aesthetic test of the Persian cook. The three are not independent. The Sasanian court gave the cuisine its institutional form; the herb tradition gave it its distinctive flavour; the tahdig gave it its test of skill. The Persian kitchen that we eat in the twenty-first century is a kitchen with roots in the Sasanian period, refined in the Persianate Islamic courts, and adapted in the modern diaspora.
The long-tail page on ancient Persian food gives a more detailed account of the Achaemenid and Sasanian record.